Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Jeff Rodgers. I'm a managing director of Slate Asset Management. I'm here to answer your questions about Slate's role in securing financing for the Mersey River wind project.
Slate is an investor and asset manager focused on essential real estate and infrastructure, founded over 20 years ago and headquartered in Toronto. Over the past two decades, we have grown to become a leading global investor in essential real estate and infrastructure, serving institutional investors including Canadian pension funds and endowments.
I joined Slate in 2022 and lead the firm's infrastructure investment strategy. By way of background, I have two decades of experience in finance, including the last 15 years dedicated to infrastructure investment.
As a Canadian firm, Slate is focused on investing in the essential real assets that serve communities and support economic growth across this country and beyond. We are owners and operators with deep expertise across the risk spectrum of real estate and infrastructure. Slate's strategy targets companies and projects that deliver essential infrastructure, and our core investment sectors include energy transition and distributed power, essential supply chain logistics, digital and communications infrastructure, district energy and building systems.
Our approach to the infrastructure market is to establish partnerships with proven developers and operators of critical infrastructure with local knowledge who seek institutional capital partners to invest in projects being developed, built or acquired. To these partnerships we bring not only capital but also expertise in financing, structuring and asset management.
In 2022, Slate invested in Roswall Development, a Halifax-based renewable energy company with extensive experience in Nova Scotia's energy sector. Roswall has successfully developed, built and operated wind and solar projects across the east coast. As a major consideration for this investment, Slate secured the rights to invest in and finance the wind projects being developed by Roswall.
Mersey River wind is one such project, and it fits squarely within our investment strategy. It's a 148.5-megawatt wind farm that will provide clean, renewable power to Nova Scotia, and it is also the first project to be delivered under the province's renewable-to-retail program. Renewall, powered by Mersey, will be the first to sell renewable power directly to end customers in Nova Scotia, introducing customer choice and competition to the market.
As a Canadian-headquartered asset manager, we are committed to investing in modern, long-term infrastructure solutions like Mersey that will contribute to Canada's future. Our role in this partnership is as the institutional capital partner and financing lead. We structured the project financing, including securing the loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank. This is consistent with our approach across our infrastructure portfolio in North America and Europe, where we leverage our financing expertise to support critical infrastructure development by our partners.
Slate's involvement in the Mersey River wind project is straightforward: We are a Canadian institutional investor partnering with an experienced Nova Scotia developer to finance, invest in and build essential infrastructure that will serve Nova Scotians for generations.
We are proud to support this innovative project and Nova Scotia's energy transition. The project will deliver clean power, create local jobs during construction and operation, and provide Nova Scotians with greater choice in their electricity supply.
I'm happy to answer questions the committee may have about Slate's role in this project.
Thank you.